Meat Boy is nothing more than blood and guts, and he’s certainly not shy about showing it. On his quest to rescue Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus, he’ll be sawed apart, crushed, blown up with missiles, eaten, burnt to a crisp, melted, and impaled.

Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, spun off from the long-running Spyro console series, is a unique mash-up of real-world toy play with a computer game. More than 30 figures (including the titular purple dragon) can be purchased at local toy stores and transformed into playable in-game characters, simply by placing them on the USB-connected Portal of Power accessory included with the game.

This seems to be the prevailing logic of Chillingo's Contre Jour HD, an iOS game in which your goal is to help a gigantic rolling eyeball creature named Petit across assorted surreal landscapes. It's not a simple process; you'll have to collect glowing lights, modify terrain as needed, avoid traps, and use nearby objects such as stretchy (and nonstretchy) tentacles, air geysers, portals, and slingshots.

Anyone with the right tools and a little coding knowhow can probably make an iOS game without too much trouble. Literally thousands of new gaming apps flood the App Store every week -- however, the quality often varies wildly. For every Canabalt and Sword & Sworcery there are probably 50 less quality titles to spend your hard-earned $0.99 to $1.99 on.

Hungry Monsters falls into the latter category: the bastard child of Critter Crunch’s food-gobbling mechanics and the indirect control seen in Yuji Naka’s Ivy the Kiwi, it isn't as well put-together, distinct, or fun as either game.

Reason would have it a game called Mos Speedrun would place emphasis on expedient traversal. In truth, that only accounts for a quarter of the focus of this platformer about a coin-collecting ladybug. Despite its title, this is a speed-run-optional affair.

For whatever reason, beards aren’t particularly common among video game protagonists. Certain stealth or action game heroes sometimes sport them (or at least heavy 5 o’clock shadow) but actual occurrences of thick, hirsute facial hair among leading men are somewhat rare. Whether it’s just an example of the casual influence of hipster aesthetic bleeding into game culture or just a response to Mario, we suspect the developers behind Kami Retro decided to go with a bearded protagonist to add a hair of uniqueness to its familiar design.

Platformers are experiencing something of a renaissance on the iPhone this month. First we got the superlative League of Evil, followed by The Blocks Cometh [iTunes Link], and now Volcano Escape has hit the scene with an M.O. to change the face of the genre. The unique new platformer from Bravo Game Studios is releasing today across all iOS devices, and from the looks of it Volcano Escape is something like Doodle Jump meets Contra. Which is a very sexy thought.